Event Description
Jo Becker, advocacy director of the children’s rights division at Human Rights Watch
In armed conflict, schools, teachers, and students have increasingly become deliberate targets of attack. The phenomenon is best known in Syria, where more than 6,000 schools have been destroyed or are no longer functioning. But in the last decade, repeated attacks on education have taken place in at least 30 countries. Military forces also use schools for military purposes, such as barracks, bases, sniper posts, and weapons depots, depriving children of their right to education, and in the worst instances, exposing them to attack. Jo Becker will discuss recent research on how education is targeted during armed conflict, and the global advocacy campaign to protect schools from attack and military use. Jo Becker is the advocacy director of the children’s rights division at Human Rights Watch and an adjunct associate professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University. As the founding chairperson of the international Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, she helped campaign successfully for an international treaty banning the forced recruitment of children under age 18 or their use in armed conflict. Her advocacy also helped lead to a groundbreaking 2011 treaty ensuring labor rights for domestic workers, which number 50-100 million worldwide. She has conducted field investigations on children’s rights in Burma, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and the United States. She has addressed the United Nations Security Council, testified before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, conducted training for American and international military officers, and testified as an expert in a Dutch war crimes trial. She has written several Human Rights Watch reports and her op-eds have appeared in the Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, The Guardian, and other major papers. She is also the author of Campaigning for Justice: Human Rights Advocacy in Practice (Stanford University Press, 2013) and the forth-coming Campaigning for Children: Strategies to Advance Children’s Rights (Stanford University Press, 2017). This event is part of the Drexel Global Passport Series (GPS): Enter the World. The inaugural year of this series centers on "Global Civic Engagement.” Drexel GPS seeks to facilitate global conversations at Drexel and in Philadelphia to ensure rich student engagement and build strong partnerships with local communities and organizations. Co-sponsored by The School of Education, the Department of Global Studies and Modern Languages, and the College of Arts and Sciences. |
